The importance of work and the threat of AI

Ruxandra Teslo, Curing cancer won’t redeem AI, Ruxandra's Substack, Sept. 1, 2026.

A few weeks ago, a poll result began circulating on X: Americans now appear to be more hostile to the construction of data centers than to the construction of nuclear power plants. This is striking because for decades, the nuclear reactor has been the archetypal object of anti-abundance politics.

Looking at how nuclear power plants have become so hated is instructive. On many objective grounds, they are perfectly fine (actually, they are glorious): a low-cost, low-carbon emission form of energy. But a big part of what made nuclear power plants so hated was, of course, not based on empirical facts, but on the imaginative horror surrounding them. The association with the Cold War and nuclear bombs. The nuclear accidents: a great explosion, scorched and poisoned landscapes, mutant creatures lingering decades after the event, wandering through the ruins of the dystopian landscape. Nuclear power accumulated an entire symbolic vocabulary of fear that went far beyond its concrete risks and outshined its benefits.

On the face of it, the concerns around data centers are largely practical and they include, most prominently, worries over water usage or electricity consumption. Andy Masley and others have done great work rebutting some of these worries from a factual perspective; for example, in articles like “The AI water issue is fake”. But I suspect that debating these concerns at the object-level misses the deeper point. The practical objections to data centers often seem less like the real source of the hostility than respectable vessels for a more diffuse fear. Vague anxiety is hard to argue from, so the imagination gives it a body: water use, electricity demand and noise. Like nuclear plants before them, data centers are acquiring a mythology of their own: vast, windowless avatars of a deeper fear that the machines built inside them may one day render human beings unnecessary.

“Rendering humans unnecessary” is broad enough and it encompasses many different fears, so I want to focus on one of the most concrete instantiations of it: the fear of job loss. Anthropic’s 2026 Public Record survey of nearly 52,000 Americans revealed that 64% of the respondents said they were worried about A.I.-induced job loss, making it the single most common fear in every state. The words “job loss” might make it sound mostly about income, but I think this understates what’s at stake for most of the population. For work provides not only income, but agency, status, belonging and a sense of control over one’s life. So what underpins the fear here is not simply losing one’s paycheck, but rather the entire social role through which one has come to understand oneself. Existing polls support this interpretation. When Americans are asked whether they would prefer the response to A.I. to consist of creating good-paying jobs or providing direct income support via governmental programs, they overwhelmingly choose the jobs.

There’s much more at the link.